For more than 30 years, Converge have managed to strike an unusual balance between celebrating and reinventing metalcore, a style of music they helped to make a reality. ‘Hum of Hurt’, their second album of 2026 following February’s ‘Love Is Not Enough’, supplies concrete evidence to support that case.
Where ‘Love Is Not Enough’ waved the flag for modern metal, ‘Hum of Hurt’ steals one back for hardcore. It is a visceral, violent, and vulnerable document of the human psyche’s struggles with anxiety and pain. It is, quite possibly, the best they’ve sounded since 2012’s ‘All We Love We Leave Behind’.
Opener Slip The Noose delivers blunt force trauma with Ben Koller’s drum fills, Jacob Bannon’s bark, and Nate Newton’s bludgeoning bass all present and correct.
It doesn’t let up from there — Detonator’s sludgy mathcore drags you into its doomy depths, Kurt Ballou’s melodic guitars dragging us back from the brink.
I Won’t Let You Go is a hostile, suffocating, and downright scary display of hardcore as if it were played by Tool, while closer Nothing Is Over is just as happy languishing in Koller’s funereal dirge as it is letting Bannon’s barks tear flesh from bone.
On an album without a single skip, Dream Debris stands tallest. Its parade-like drums give way to Newton’s bass — a pulsating throb that threatens to burst open like an abscess before mellowing into a slow rumble and ascending towards rupture once more. Bannon switches between clean vocals and visceral screams like a man at war with himself, its lo-fi mix coming off as low-key terrifying.
‘Hum of Hurt’ might be Converge’s response to Bannon’s research into tinnitus, which saw the frontman discover ‘the hum’ and question whether it’s the sound of all the world’s pain, yet it’s delivered like an attack on anyone who dares to say Converge are past it. They are far from done with this world.
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